European Space Agency simulation module used to study the effects of long term confinement. Photo: Pavel Zelensky/AFP/Getty Images

In June 2010, as part of the Mars 500 research project, the European Space Agency (ESA) put six trainee astronauts into a space flight simulation. In a giant ” tin can” in a Moscow hangar with no sun, no fresh water and no alcohol for 520 days, the psychological tenacity of these six ground-bound astronauts will be under constant scrutiny. Mars 500 is the most ambitious space-simulator research to date. The ESA put away its trainees in similar conditions for 105 days in 2009.

As a spokesman for Mars 500, Dr. Christer Fuglesang, a Swedish astronaut with the human spaceflight directorate of the European Space Agency (ESA) emphasised the usefulness of the study:

“This isn’t a joke. It will give a lot of useful information, not just about Mars but also for Earth […] People are isolated in many places in the world. We have scientists in the south pole for a long time, or in submarines. Then there are all those in jail.”

Fuglesang is right. Solitary confinement is never a joke.

Well-wishers, family and friends watch a video of the miners projected onto a screen erected near the collapsed gold and copper mine near Copiapó, Chile. Photo: Ivan Alvarado / Reuters.

When the Chilean miners were trapped for 69 days experts from NASA were called in as experts on the psychological strains of long term confinement. A call to the management of any one of America’s hundreds Intense Management Units (IMUs) could have been as useful (except for the fact that prisoners are hardly cared for or monitored in the way necessary to improve their psychological state.) On any given day in the United States, 20,000 men, women and children are held in solitary confinement.

I have used this quote before, but it bears repeating:

First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose. Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving” (Haney). [They] become essentially catatonic.

Source: Hellhole, The New Yorker, March 30, 2009, by Atul Gawande.

UNFATHOMABLE SCALE

Everyday in American prisons wallow the equivalent of 600 Chilean mining disasters … except prisoners can remain penned in for longer than 69 days.

“The [psychological and cognitive effects of long term isolation] is not something that’s easy to study,” says Craig Haney, psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, “and not something that prison systems are eager to have people look at.” Haney leads academic research on solitary confinement and notes that US prisons didn’t always resort to its current widespread use:

We have an overwhelmingly crowded prison system in which the mandate to rehabilitate and provide activities for prisoners was suspended at the same time as the prison system became overcrowded. Not surprisingly, prison systems faced with this influx of prisoners, and lacking the rewards they once had to manage and control prisoner behavior, turned to the use of punishment. And one big punishment is the threat of long-term solitary confinement. They’ve used it without a lot of forethought to its consequences. That policy needs to be rethought. (Source)